From Domestic Ethnography to a Cinema of Mourning: Finding the Father on Film

In the end, one must recognize that all this filling up and patching over of holes in the Real has its limits. And yet, as regards the work of mourning, cinema and video possess a remarkable potential for creating new therapeutic communities, joined by bereavement, loss and the need for healing. 

– Michael Renov

My PhD documentary film, Roger Frampton Comes Alive! (Emily Rytmeister, 2021),¹ documents and celebrates the life and work of my jazz musician father, Roger Frampton (1948-2000). It chronicles the path he took to become the musician and man he was, highlights the contribution he made to Australian jazz and improvised music, and acknowledges the flaws in his character that impeded his personal and professional success. It also communicates the tragedy of his early death and the impact it had on his family, friends and the Australian jazz community. In my dissertation, I acknowledged my film as a work of “patriography”² or “biography of the father.” I explored my relationship with my father and the way it manifested in my film and throughout the filmmaking process. I identified that the primary determinant of the portrait of my father presented in the film was my love for him. This love was underscored by my grief over his passing and the desire to create an ongoing connection with him through the making of the film and the final film itself. I also identified as implicit in patriographies, such as my film, the desire to connect with the father in order to achieve separation from him. This separation fosters a clarity in one’s self-knowledge that in turn allows a closeness to the father. Indeed, through the making of Roger Frampton Comes Alive!, I felt I came to know both my father and myself.

The territory that underlay this effort to profile Frampton was, nevertheless, deeply fraught. My desire to revere him needed to be tempered with respect to both his personal and professional lives. At the same time, the sense of loss I had harboured – from long before his death and as the result of his shortcomings as a father – resonated below the surface; this too, required mitigation. I began the project as a fully-fledged woman with children of my own, yet the filmmaking process sometimes wavered in a child-like fashion between hagiography and resentment. I sought to make sense of my father’s life and contribution to music, but also to reconcile a period of estrangement, his lack of responsibility (to me, to my mother, to his family), his penchant for women, wine, and marijuana, and his inability to manage his own affairs. Implicit in all this was the search for clues to my own identity. I craved insight to the delineation between my father and myself, with respect to both creative practice and my own individuality.

Film scholar Michael Renov recognises the psychoanalytic function of documentary film and posits the notion of the “domestic ethnography,” which he defines as “a mode of autobiographical practice that couples self-interrogation with ethnography’s concern for the lives of others. But the Other in this instance is a family member who serves less as a source of disinterested social scientific research than as a mirror or foil for the self. Due to kinship ties, subject and object are embroiled in each other. The result is self-portraiture refracted through a familial Other.”³ Roger Frampton Comes Alive!, is a “domestic ethnography”, as are the films that will be subsequently discussed. In all these films, the line between the filmmaker’s father and the filmmaker’s self is blurred. They represent the filmmaker’s journey toward self-understanding and self-acceptance, but take as its subject the father. In exploring and presenting the life of that father on-screen, the filmmaker seeks an illumination of their own family history and identity.

The crafting of Roger Frampton Comes Alive! as a “domestic ethnography” demanded an interrogation of Frampton’s character through interviews with his/my family members, his collaborators and students. At times, this brought to the surface truths that, although difficult to hear, provided clarity on certain aspects of his personality. Prior to filmmaking, I was not sure, for example, whether he had been unfaithful to any partner other than my mother (he had); I did not know if he experimented with drugs aside from marijuana (he did – cocaine); I did not know if he was perceived as depressive by those outside the family (he was); I was unsure of whether he demonstrated self-awareness among colleagues (he did not). More often, however, the challenge with interviewees was communicating my receptiveness to criticism of my father and freeing space for frank and open conversation to occur. An acceptance of Frampton’s considerable musical abilities served as something of a starting point – no one disputed them – but, when it came to deeper exploration, there was a reluctance to discuss his faults. The challenge was surmounted by my own acknowledgement of his shortcomings, such as references to his stubbornness and defiance of authority, and his tendency to self-sabotage. Once these idiosyncrasies were recognised, interviewees opened up with stories attesting to the same, and more. Legendary American trumpeter, Don Rader, concluded, “I could be anywhere in the world with this guy and we could make music together,” but also that “if Roger hadn’t been as eccentric as he made himself out to be, he’d have gone a lot further because people were afraid of him after a while.” Similarly, pianist Mike Nock offered, “Because of his unrelenting originality, he was his own worst enemy.” Many of his students (who went on to become colleagues) reflected on his drug use. It was as much my ethos as a filmmaker as it was my curiosity as Frampton’s daughter that drove me to interrogate these aspects of his life; I sought to construct a portrait of the man and musician who was my father that considered his competencies and deficiencies in equal measure. The goal was to produce a cinematic work that considered my father as a whole being, but also to confront the reality of my own lineage. In doing so, I hoped to illuminate something of both my creative self and who I am as a person.

At the same time, underlying these intentions was a lingering sadness over my father’s early death. I desired to make sense of his death as much as his life, and my own life. I was driven to express the sense of loss I felt, and to contextualise his entire existence – one that spanned just 51 years – before I, myself, reached the age at which he died. Biographer and scholar, Brenda Wineapple, elucidates this relationship between grief and the biographical project: 

At its heart, biography is a graveside mourning[,] the biographer pries open coffins, beckoning the reader into a harrowing world where the dead are not quite dead, the forgotten never forgotten… Indeed, the entire biographical project is suffused with the sadness of loss. Amidst all her documents and between the lines of her prose, the biographer knows that whomever she seeks will not and cannot come to her.⁴ 

Despite this same sense of hopelessness and futile searching accompanying the film’s making, it was overcome by an existential urgency to complete the story of my father’s life and work.

In its demonstration of the desire to fill the gap in the life of the filmmaker that remains after losing a loved one, my film (and the others I discuss here) resonates with Renov’s idea of a “work of mourning.” While Renov acknowledges such films as a “memorialization of loss… that is also and profoundly an instance of self-inscription,”⁵ what they further represent is a new and ongoing connection between the bereaved filmmaker and the deceased subject. This notion of producing a creative work in response to the loss of a loved one – both through its process and as represented by the final work itself – possesses remarkable potential for the mitigation of grief.

Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect (2003) seeks to fill the gap in his life that was left as the result of his father’s death. It also embraces his yearning for closeness to his father and clues to his own identity. Subtitled A Son’s Journey, this performative documentary is as much about Nathaniel Kahn the filmmaker as it is about Louis Kahn the architect. The narrative is driven by Kahn’s quest to understand his father, and to uncover the reasons he died alone and bankrupt thirty years earlier, after suffering a heart attack in a bathroom at Pennsylvania Station, New York. With his current address on his passport crossed out, it took three days for his body to be identified. At the time, Nathaniel was just 11 years old. 

Kahn is open in his acknowledgement of the film as his effort to “find” his father. Through voiceover, he informs the viewer from the outset that his father never lived with him and his mother, although his mother insists the crossed-out address on his passport is proof he intended to do so. As the film conveys, through his peripatetic existence, Louis Kahn in fact managed to create three families, remaining married to one woman while maintaining the other two. He fathered a child with each. While none of these families crossed paths until Louis’ funeral, it appears that each was aware of the others. 

This complex life of Louis Kahn as father and biographical subject presents highly fraught territory for Nathaniel Kahn as son and patriographical filmmaker. It provides rich fodder through which Nathaniel must wade in his attempt to make sense of his father, and of himself. Kahn’s sense of longing for his father drives his creative journey, and so, the film. Reflecting that he can recall every detail of the occasions where his father spent an entire day with him and his mother, Kahn recollects: 

For years, I struggled to be satisfied with the little piece of my father’s life I’d been allowed to see. But it wasn’t enough. I needed to know him. I needed to find out who he really was. So I set out on a journey – to see his buildings and find whatever was left of him out there. It would take me to the other side of the world, looking for the man who left me so many questions. 

This sense of having unanswered questions, the need to know, the compulsion to understand the father, underlies all patriographies, including my own. In the case of Roger Frampton Comes Alive!, entwined in my grief over his death was the lost opportunity to understand who my father was as a man and musician. I needed to know: was he significant and, if so, how? What was it that made my father who he was? For me, and for other patriographical filmmakers, the answers to such questions can illuminate not only the father, but the filmmakers themselves – as creative practitioners and as human beings. As Renov states: 

domestic ethnography is more than simply another variant of autobiographical discourse, given its explicitly outward gaze; nominally, at least, this mode of documentation takes as its object the father, mother, grandparent, child, or sibling who is genetically linked to the authorial subject… [However] care must be taken in defining the particular relations that obtain between the domestic ethnographer and her subject. There is a peculiar sort of reciprocity (which might equally be termed self-interest) built into the construction of Other subjectivities in this para-ethnographic mode.⁶

As Renov asserts, in a film such as mine or Kahn’s, while the overt subject is the father, it is also, and as much, the filmmaker. As creative practitioners, we are forced to search for our fathers – to make sense of their lives and, in turn, our own lives. If our fathers die, we grieve for them and, where our relationships with them were deficient, we are driven to repair that deficiency. We are compelled to gain a closeness to them that was not possible during their lifetime and to create a connection with them that compensates for what the relationship lacked. The connection I forged with my father through the making of Roger Frampton Comes Alive! provided some healing for the five years during which we had minimal contact – a period that coincided with one of his marriages. Throughout the film’s pre-production period, I re-read letters he sent me at the end of that marriage, including one where he laments: “There’s too much to tell you about (my soon-to-be-ex-wife) but one thing I must say is that she made it impossible for me to be in touch with you. I think she resented that I already had a child and since we couldn’t have one I was not allowed to be in contact with you, or something like that. I don’t know.” The reluctance to assert his own independence within that relationship, and the willingness to assign blame for our estrangement to his then-wife, was something I had overlooked at the time. Revisiting the letter more than 20 years on, I was able to see his frailties for what they were, to observe the consistency of his behaviour as a partner (which was to move on as soon as a relationship required effort), and to forgive him (and his then-wife). This is not to say that my sentiments towards my father were suddenly rendered “neat and tidy;” rather, that time, maturity, reflection, and my own experience of parenthood aided the contextualisation of his fallibility.

For Kahn, the understanding of his father grows through the interviews he undertakes with his father’s contemporaries. This also occurred in my filmmaking experience through my interviews with the musicians of my father’s generation who were able to reflect on his strengths and weaknesses as a professional and person. Several of Louis Kahn’s surviving colleagues impart wisdom to Nathaniel through discussions about Louis’ architecture. In one such interview, someone recalls Louis regularly spending Christmas with him and his family, and falling asleep while watching cartoons with his children. The anecdote must be particularly stinging for Kahn, and the architect subtly shifts to insights that align Louis’ architectural approach to his view of humanity. He likens the holes and bumps in the concrete walls that surround them to Louis’ significant facial scarring, and observes that all Louis’ buildings embrace their imperfections. He reflects, “He probably learned to think about himself that way.”

Other exchanges are of equal profundity for Nathaniel. The architect who worked with Louis in India the day before he died speaks of him with a deep respect. He offers comfort to Nathaniel, reassuring him that “If you go into silence, you will hear him.” When another associate learns that Nathaniel is Louis’ son, he embraces him, sobbing, “You are Lou!” Late in the film, in the Capitol Building in Bangladesh – Louis’ last and most significant work – Nathaniel interviews Shamsul Wares, the Bangladeshi architect who worked on the project under Louis. Wares provides a context in which Nathaniel can potentially reconcile his father’s faults, stating that Louis’ failure “to satisfy the family life is an inevitable association of great people… He could not probably find the right kind of love for you, but for (the Bangladeshi people), he has given the right kind of love… He loved everybody. To love everybody is to sometimes not see the very closest ones. And that is inevitable for men of his stature.”

My Architect Theatrical Poster

This notion of the father’s greatness, and those around him citing it as reason for overlooking failures, is a common feature of the patriographical narrative. During pre-production, I discovered other letters – this time between my grandmother and my father, following an altercation Roger had had with his father (my grandfather). My grandmother asserts, “We all made allowances for you as a child because we knew you were different.” Clearly, this allowance was something my father came to expect right throughout his life, from his loved-ones in particular. In his reply to my grandmother, he counters, “Perhaps you should not have let me get away with things as you say you did. Perhaps you should have pulled me up more often.” This readiness to resist ownership of his behaviour – to feel somehow exempt from the standards to which others are held – was characteristic of Roger Frampton. Yet it was a conspiracy in which all those who loved him colluded. Nathaniel Kahn concedes of his father’s flaws, “I know I should feel anger at my father for certain things… but since he died when I was 11, I never got to that point.”⁷ Roger Frampton died when I was 26, and while I acknowledge past frustration with his sense of entitlement, this has long subsided, and been replaced with an awareness of all humans’ foibles and the concessions we make for the significant people in our lives.

The insights into Nathaniel Kahn’s experience of piecing together his father’s story accentuate the perpetual nature of the patriographical journey. They also demonstrate the value – and the irony – of the final patriographical creative product. Kahn refers to an interview with one of his father’s clients, who recalls Louis breaking down and revealing the dysfunction in his relationship with his own father. Despite the interview having taken place on the first day of filming, Kahn was unable to incorporate it into the film. Of this (glaring) omission, he confesses, “I didn’t know how to follow up properly… I should have pushed more and found out more.”⁸ In this sense, although it represents only the beginning of a true explication of Louis Kahn as a father, My Architect: A Son’s Journey is a poignant and holistic account of the life and work of Louis Kahn as both architect and man. It also represents an opportunity for Kahn to grieve the loss of his father and gain insights into his own identity. Through these compensatory mechanisms provided by the filmmaking journey, it is possible for Kahn to fill the gap in his life and himself that has existed as the result of his father’s life and death. He finds solace in the new relationships he forms with his half-siblings and one of his father’s surviving partners, as well as through the legacy of his father’s body of work. One of the film’s most moving sequences features Kahn rollerblading through the courtyard of one of his father’s most significant buildings, the Salk Institute, California. The scene is a tribute to his father, imbued with fondness and appreciation for this man, a connection to whom he yearned for so long. As Renov affirms of “domestic ethnography,” the scene “offers up the maker and [his] subject locked in a family embrace.”⁹

The creative journeys underlying Kahn’s My Architect, and my film, Roger Frampton Comes Alive!, are propelled by a hunger for knowledge about the filmmaker’s family history – a compulsion to learn about the filmmaker’s self. Both are driven by the deficient relationship between the filmmaker-child and subject-father and the disconnect between the filmmakers’ knowledge of their fathers and their own self-knowledge. 

Such a profound disconnect does not underlie Denny Tedesco’s The Wrecking Crew (2008) and Rashida Jones and Alan Hicks’ Quincy (2018). Both participatory documentaries take as their focus the subject-father’s professional life as a musician, as occurs in my film. Like Roger Frampton Comes Alive!, these two films celebrate and communicate the father’s contribution to music through interviews with his family, friends and colleagues. The thrust of Tedesco’s film is that a group of Los Angeles session musicians whose playing on innumerable hit recordings of the 1960s and 1970s is essentially responsible for the success of the songs and the artists who performed them. The group came to be known as “The Wrecking Crew” and one of the players, guitarist Tommy Tedesco, is Tedesco’s father. Twelve years from commencement of filming to release, the film’s interviews with many high-profile artists all attest to the ingenuity of “The Wrecking Crew” and the subtleties of their playing that came to define an era of popular music. While Tommy Tedesco passed away a year after filming began, the film exhibits characteristics of a work of mourning that are less complicated than in the works of Kahn and myself. A few minutes into the film, Tedesco offers this light-hearted narration:

Here’s the irony: you spend your whole life playing guitar, creating guitar licks that people all around the world recognise, but nobody knows your name – until you’re dead. And then, even in the end, they mis-spell your name and call you “Tony Tedesco” instead of “Tommy.” Tommy was not only a legendary guitarist – he was my father. But he was also a member of an elite group of studio musicians. So what follows is the story of my father and his extended family, “The Wrecking Crew.”

Tedesco’s film is a true showcase of the contribution of “The Wrecking Crew” to a defining era of popular music. He explores not only his father’s presence within the scene, but that of many others, including bassist Carol Kaye, drummer Hal Blaine and saxophonist Plas Johnson. He makes apparent the precise nature of the musicians’ contributions to the hundreds of recordings on which they played. The nuances of basslines crafted during recording sessions by Carol Kaye, for example, are demonstrated in their initial arrangement, followed by Kaye’s interpretation, elucidating the process through which the music passed in the hands of these gifted musicians, and that resulted in its widespread appeal. As composer, Jimmy Webb, describes them in the film, “They were a product of the 40s, 50s and 60s, and they were great musicians who came of age when rock ’n’ roll came of age. And there they are at the height of their physical power, with all of this talent. And they’re in the right place. And it’s the right time. And so they get to do this.”

This approach taken by Tedesco serves to contextualise his father, his understanding of whom is clearly already integrated into himself. He frames his father as working often, but when at home, highly attentive to his wife and children. The film thus acts as a memorialisation of his father, without the need to make sense of his father and his shortcomings through the filmmaking process. Despite this, Tedesco was initially reluctant to embrace his familial attachment on screen. As follows:

We had cut 30 minutes of the film when a friend, Grady Cooper, asked me why I was cutting it this way. His comments were stinging. “Any one of us editors in the building could cut this the same way. You have insight that none of us have, and you’re not going there.” And I wasn’t. My ego was getting in the way – I wanted to be known as the “director” of the film first, and not the son of the musician. We talked about it with Claire Scanlon, our editor, and I started messing around with a voiceover at the beginning. It was the best advice anyone could have given. That personal side of the story added another dimension to the film that viewers could relate to.¹⁰

Tedesco’s use of first-person narration in his film indeed provides an “insider” perspective that allows viewers to readily connect with the work. His voice strategically guides the viewer through the story of his father and the other members of “The Wrecking Crew” by acknowledging his relationship to them. In the case of Roger Frampton Comes Alive!, it is the audio of a key question I pose to my grandmother that performs this function, as well as her statements throughout the film. At the very opening of the film, while I am not visible on-screen, I can be heard off-camera, asking, “So Nan, what do you think is Dad’s legacy?” My grandmother responds, “I could say his music but even at his funeral I felt like an outsider, because people would come up to me and say he was a genius. And I thought, that’s my son you’re talking about. He’s my son. I don’t think, ‘He’s my genius.’ He’s my son. And it makes you feel a bit strange, because he’s not yours anymore – he belongs to those other people. And that’s the way he wanted it.” While I was encouraged to openly embrace my attachment to my father by my PhD supervisors, my jazz musician husband and several interviewees – either through narration or by appearing in the film – I delayed my final decision until late in the editing process. At the culmination of my filmmaking journey, I felt that my sentiments about my father and his life were captured succinctly by my grandmother, and that any additional insights directly from me were unnecessary.

Rashida Jones and Alan Hicks’ participatory documentary, Quincy (2018), explores the illustrious career and contribution of American music legend, Quincy Jones. Quincy’s daughter Rashida’s collaboration with Australian drummer Alan Hicks allows access to Quincy’s life and personal contacts that would likely not be afforded to an alternative director. It also features Jones interacting with her father in a number of on-camera contexts, including at extended family gatherings and in the car as he travels to official engagements. While it does acknowledge some of Quincy’s flaws – including the infidelity and workaholism that eroded his five marriages – the film is an overwhelming “celebration of adoration” of Jones’ father. The film glorifies Quincy’s role in American music history, with an emphasis on his African lineage, and portrays him as a loving, committed father to all his seven children. The depiction of Quincy’s musical success is justified, yet its tone blatantly hagiographical. This is exemplified by Jones’ acceptance speech at the 2019 Grammy Awards, where the film won “best music film.” While Hicks thanks Quincy for simply “living his unparalleled life,” Jones declares:

No one’s career has quite had the same impact on culture, decade after decade, like my father’s has. With this movie, we aimed to show that what underscores his unstoppable drive, that helps him crash through racial barriers, to master multiple genres, to decategorize artistry, to refuse to be limited in any capacity, is his enormous heart and unwavering faith in humanity. When my Dad first watched the film, he said, “I wish I could live forever,” and if anyone is going to be the first to be able to do that, I believe it’s going to be him. So Dad, I hope you live forever.¹¹

Jones’ attachment to her father – the desire to immortalise him to which she alludes above – renders the film a work of mourning despite the fact her father is still alive. The film explores his ailing health, including a scene with Jones and some of her siblings at Quincy’s hospital bedside after he has suffered a blood clot during a hectic international touring schedule. Here, Jones implores her father to take care of himself and is clearly confronted by his mortality. While Jones grappled over whether to include this scene, her decision to do so was motivated by her desire to impact Quincy himself and appeal to him to attend to his health.¹² This prospect of the father as audience to his own patriography calls to mind two vastly different written works of the father by Edmund Gosse¹³ and invites the question of how Jones’ work would differ were she not aware of her father’s intention to view the film once it was complete.¹⁴ In the crafting of my film, although I periodically envisioned my father’s reaction to its construction, I was also aware of the freedom his absence provided. While I was conscious of the presence of his spirit within his music and those I interviewed, and was motivated to preserve and honour his memory, I was afforded a creative advantage that Jones was not. Nevertheless, like my film, Jones’ work functions as her father’s eulogy, imbued with her unmitigated reverence for, and utter devotion to, him. For Jones, as it was for me, the relationship to the father is well represented by the final product. As Renov recognises, “For the domestic ethnographer, there is no fully outside position available. Blood ties affect linkages of shared memory, physical resemblance, temperament, and, of course, family forged behavioural or attitudinal dysfunction toward which the artist – through her work – can fashion accommodation but no escape.”¹⁵ 

This influence of the daughter-father relationship on that of biographer-subject underlies Jones’ work as well as my own. It is not merely inescapable but embraced by Jones, as it was by me. While the magnitude of Quincy Jones’ impact on music far outweighs that of Roger Frampton, both films memorialise the father-subject by honouring their individual careers and contributions, while also recognising their limitations (however fleetingly). Both films ultimately allow the daughter-filmmakers’ love to dominate the patriographical portraits. As creative practitioners and as daughters, Jones and I both are bonded to our fathers through our patriographical works and through the processes that led to their construction.

As in the case of my film, Roger Frampton Comes Alive!, the patriographical films that have been considered here all convey the capacity for biographical documentary film to serve as a means of self-understanding. Also like my film, they function as the filmmaker’s cathartic expression of the loss of their father, even in instances where the father’s death has not yet occurred. In the words of Renov:

For the most part, the films and tapes to which I have alluded here respond to private or familial sorrows, though almost always in a manner that implicates others… Frequently, however, I have seen these pieces foster identification well beyond that initial audience. I have argued that the film or tape can function as a work of mourning both for the artist and for a community of others who share the experience of loss. In addition, the work may, through the trigger of grief and in spite of cultural or political differences, engender spectator identification with the maker who focalizes loss from a radically alien position.¹⁶ 

As occurred in the works of the filmmakers considered here, the process of making Roger Frampton Comes Alive! brought me closer to my father and the film itself now represents a connection between us that remains ongoing. As Renov suggests above, however, these works have a broader appeal. This potential exists in their ability to elucidate and alleviate the experience of loss – for those who have lost their fathers, for those who are in the midst of losing them, or for those who will lose them.

Endnotes